Ad Publishers?

[Penguin]

Hey Guys,

Anyone here using any publisher networks - Adsense or YPN for example? If so how far have you got and do you have any tips? I've been 'toddeling' around with Adsense for a while with limited success but i'm sticking with it

Wacking ads into the main content seems to be the new approach which is something i plan to try with a new site i'm developing with a friend.

I guess one of my biggest problems is getting traffic in the first place, or actually finishing a project. One of the most important things i guess is actually having a decent site but i've got 2 sites i'm developing alone right now which will hopefully get somewhere success wise.

The frustrating thing is i hear alot of other people who have maybe been in the adsense game for a couple of months and are already making 100$/day.

Andy

-- Writing this post has actually proved educational for me as i believe i may have discovered my fatal flaw. My old adsense sites generally suck (Had to be admitted sooner or later).

 

[KevinUK]

I've just started to tinker with adsense while I develop a site I'm working on but these case studies are interesting, talks about how the position of the ads greatly determines the amount of money coming in

http://services.google.com/adsense/breeze/optimization/385480/index.html

 

[Penguin]

Thanks for that Kevin. Hadn't spotted that before, it's interesting. With my newest project i'll take all of these tips into account, wider blocks and top-middle ads - see how that words out.

 

[Maljonic]

I find they (adsense text ads) work best if you don't force them on your visitors, don't stick them right in the middle of your content but put them to one side. I know some people/tutorials suggest making the colours blend with your site, but I get more money from the really obvious google ads that use exactly the same colours as the ads in google search results. I also only put them on article and site content pages, not on the front page - because it looks naf and they don't really do any good there anyway. With the articles people have usually found your page by searching for the topic, so the ads are usually based on a topic they're already interested in.

Edit: Just wanted to add that it's the actual content though that will get you the money in the end, this is what gets the visitors via search results in the first place. You can go nuts fiddling about with ads, positioning etc when you could have spent all that time writing stuff that people will want to look for.

 

[Chilly]

Your first mistake is even caring about the ads until the content is as good as you can get it, concentrate on the content and the traffic will come, then when it costs more than $fuckall to host (if you pay more than that for small/medium hosting you are a fool) you stick the ads in and see what happens. If you just fill a site with crap and ads, its not surprising you got little traffic/earnings.

 

[Shovel]

I shall echo Chilly and also point out that while it's true there are some more prominent page positions for ads than others, if you obstruct your content people will go somewhere else.

I think a lot can be learned from Gmail's ad positioning. I can read the emails absolutely fine, but the ads column next to it still catches my eye (and the relevence of the ads has meant I click them sometimes too).

 

[Penguin]

Your first mistake is even caring about the ads until the content is as good as you can get it, concentrate on the content and the traffic will come, then when it costs more than $fuckall to host (if you pay more than that for small/medium hosting you are a fool) you stick the ads in and see what happens. If you just fill a site with crap and ads, its not surprising you got little traffic/earnings.

Yeah, i've built up a little on the content of the particular site recently and made it a little more search engine friendly (hopefully) currently on a free host (Well, small one off payment of $3) which seems good enough to get started on. Shall see how things go.

 

[Maljonic]

That's good; you have to keep on building though, adding more and more unique pages and content all the time if you want to make the 100s of dollars you mentioned.